MOCA Cleveland opens show with outsider's take on Cleveland, another with reflections on death

Sophie Calle's Les Tombes #17 (The Graves)" is included in "DIRGE: Reflections on [Life and] Death" at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.

Story swapping and discovering shared truths is one way relationships begin to take shape.
Two new exhibits at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland pull from commonalities in the way we live and die.
As separate exhibitions, “DIRGE: Reflections on [Life and] Death” and “Sara VanDerBeek” will open March 7 in the 2-year-old MOCA building, a museum without a permanent collection.
Megan Lykins Reich, director of programs and associate curator at MOCA and curator of “DIRGE,” said the two exhibits span the spectrum of contemporary art, making it easy for artgoers with varied tastes to find common ground with the art on which to relate.
“(‘DIRGE’) is very figurative, representational. Sara is more abstracted. So it’s a wonderful pairing. In most of the work in “DIRGE” … there’s a degree of familiarity in every piece. Very little abstraction. Even if it’s a minimalistic work.”
New York-based artist VanDerBeek gives an outsider’s perspective of Cleveland in work commissioned by Chief Curator David Norr.
VanDerBeek has photographed ancient statues in Rome and buildings in New Orleans affected by Hurricane Katrina.
Now she will present her take on Cleveland.
“Norr asked me to come to Cleveland to reflect upon the history and its current landscape and where it’s going,” VanDerBeek said. “I visited Cleveland twice in 2013 to develop the photographic work.”
Through that exploration she also created the sculptural aspects of her show.
A Baltimore native who moved to New York City for college, she said she recognized something familiar about Cleveland.
“I felt a lot of correlation,” she said. “I’m really interested in transformation and change as a universal experience.”
Rather than seeing Baltimore or Cleveland as in a state of decay, VanDerBeek said the state is more about transformation.
“Some of the textures and qualities of the sites I photographed are emblematic of that,” she said.
She visited the demolition site of The Alhambra apartments — Cleveland’s largest apartment complex when it was built in 1902.
A piece from the roof caught her attention, and the resulting photographs will be displayed as large prints in her show.
“The lines are formed by the paper cracking and breaking open the silver paint to reveal the tar paper,” she said.
“They’re really meant to be experienced in person and that sensation of kind of the composition shifting and changing as you look at them from different points of view.”
For “DIRGE,” Reich, collected 23 artists’ work from as early as 1973 and from across the globe that she said represent how varied the idea of death is perceived.
“My goal territorially is to bring an appreciation of life as you see life’s end,” Reich said.
She said curating the show become more informed by the experience of losing several people in her life.
“I had a deeper understanding of grief and mourning and to know how to broaden the scope of the show and what I needed to do in terms of the sensitivity of what works form what artist,” she said.
The works range from a series of 16 video screens depicting the struggle of battling cancer to a coffin made out of dresser drawers inherited from the artist’s grandfather.
“And then you have artists who are responding in a deeper way philosophically,” she said.
Oscar Muñoz is a Colombian artist working on “the sense of vanishing,” Reich said.
“What we are displaying is a set of 8-inch steel disks that sit on the wall. They look like mirrors. The vapor of your breath reveals the image of someone who has died.”
She said the work allows the artist and the viewer to form a relationship.
“You’re igniting the piece a little bit with your breath,” she said.
Other areas of the exhibition are more directly interactive and allow the visitors to leave memories of a lost loved one.

“DIRGE” and “Sara VanDerBeek” are open March 7 through June 8 at MOCA Cleveland, 11400 Euclid Ave. For a list of programs and speakers related to the exhibits, visit www.mocacleveland.org. MOCA is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays and is closed on Mondays. Call the museum at 216-421-8671.

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